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In this paper, some variant of the word "recovered" is used 12 times, generally to describe some of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) patients who had taken part in a cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) trial for CFS[1].

Actometer data from this study has recently been released[2]. This paper reported that CBT did not cause an increase in physical activity at the end of treatment. Before CBT, the patients did a mean 67.4 units of activity (standard deviation(SD): 21.8); following CBT, patients did 68.8 units of activity (SD: 25.2). The authors report that a previous study [3] found healthy controls had a mean Actometer score of 91 (S.D.=25). There was also no increase in activity levels in two other CBT trials examined[4,5].

The authors[2] also found that in the three CBT studies, changes in physical activity were not related to changes in fatigue. So "recovery from fatigue" does not necessarily mean recovery from CFS in terms of achieving normal activity levels.

In another Dutch CBT study[6], 37% of patients were said to be recovered from fatigue, where recovery was defined as no longer scoring on any of the 3 negative factors of the Fatigue Quality List (FQL). However when low scores on other questionnaires were also required to fulfil "full recovery", only 23% of the sample were said to be in "full recovery". Note that only subjective measures were used in that definition of full recovery - a return to a normal level of activity, as measured by an actometer, was not required.

Incidentally, a paper has recently been released which also examined language used to describe fatigue by CFS patients and healthy controls[6]. It is slightly different as phrases rather than adjectives were used to describe the fatigue e.g. "Mentally tired after the slightest effort", "Lack the energy to talk to anyone", etc. Factor analyses revealed a five-factor structure for participants with ME/CFS but only a one-factor solution for the control group. The five factors for fatigue in ME/CFS participants were described as: "Post-Exertional", "Wired", "Brain-Fog", "Energy" and "Flu-Like".